Playwright Annie Baker ("The Flick") Photo Credit: Zack DeZon

The Deal In an unusual move, Tim Sanford, artistic director of Playwrights Horizons, recently emailed a letter to thousands of the theater's subscribers to defend Annie Baker's new play "The Flick," which won raves from some critics but has angered countless others due to its length, many pauses and slow pace. "Annie had a vision and this production beautifully executes that vision. And at the end of the day, we are a writer's theater and my first responsibility is to that writer," Sanford wrote. He noted that many subscribers have walked out at intermission and complained "emphatically" to the house manager about the play.

Steve Kazee, who officially exited the musical "Once" late in March but had been out of the show on vocal rest since early February, finally addressed the situation on his personal blog. Kazee said that he sustained a "vocal injury" on Feb. 6, and although he is getting better, he ran the "risk of hemorrhaging a vocal cord" if he re-entered the show too soon. "This is not how I had imagined the run of the show would end for me and to say it has been disappointing would be understating it quite a bit," he wrote.

The Deal Dozens of protesters representing the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property, a Pennsylvania-based Catholic group, protested outside the Walter Kerr Theatre on March 25 before the first preview performance of "The Testament of Mary." Colm Tóibín's play, which is based on his controversial novel, depicts the Virgin Mary after the death of Jesus. On its website, the group described the novel as "blasphemous" and "heretical." In a statement provided by Playbill.com, the show's producers said the show "is neither anti-Mary nor anti-Christianity, but rather a portrait of a very human woman."

The Deal Unlike its rapturous reception on Broadway, the London critics did not take kindly to "The Book of Mormon," which just opened there. The Telegraph described it as "a decadent and self-indulgent musical which ultimately proves repellent." The Daily Mail found it to be "a cowardly, coarse, cynical show, worth avoiding." The Times went so far as to call it "pretty racist." But the musical still managed to break the record in London for the most money earned in ticket sales by any show in a single day.